04/11/2017

This one is called "One Last Thing" and was just published in the spring issue of Crazyhorse. I was completely surprised and delighted when they accepted the story. "One Last Thing" is about a mother running an errand for her 10-year-old son's birthday. If you'd like to read it, you can find it in issue no. 91 of Crazyhorse, or you can download a pdf here. I hope you enjoy it.

02/21/2017

I mentioned this last month, but in case you missed it: my short story, "Bliss," was just published in Carve's Winter 2017 issue. It's a story about a couple on their honeymoon. After 9 drafts and 7 rejections, I'm very happy that this story has finally found a home.

01/15/2017

I have some writing news! My short story, "Bliss," is being published in the Winter 2017 issue of Carve.

I'm thrilled about my story finding a home, especially with a literary magazine I've long admired. If you'd like a copy of the printed issue (which includes, among other things, interviews with the fiction writers) you can preorder a copy here. Be sure to use the discount code "CARVEFRIEND" to receive 10% off!

My short story will also be available to read on Carve's website. I'll share a link when it's live.

03/14/2014

Inside the oiled oak dresser, in the top drawer, was a great deal of lace: swaths of black and nude, but nudged underneath was a tangerine chemise that, when hugged against her freckled skin, caused her to appear anemic. She should get rid of it, she knew – but what did you even do with something like that? Surely you didn't donate it. Stacked deeper in the drawer were towers of jewelry boxes, constructed from swirled gold boxboard (in one, a tangled knot of necklaces, and in another, a twisted-chain bracelet passed down from her great grandmother, tarnished to a deep copper, which she imagined was probably the color of heartache). There were stockings stippled with clear nail polish, a cruise pamphlet her sister had sent to her last winter, chock-full of gleaming photos (among the ship's amenities: a surf simulator, a planetarium, and butler service...!), linen sachets that at a previous time had smelled strongly of lavender, a crumpled grocery list, an empty prescription vial, and a number of threadbare shirts she wore when running or gardening or scrubbing the back of the shower curtain. How alarmingly light it all felt after being deposited into a cardboard box. How insignificant. It was taped, labelled ("Bedroom. Dresser.") and transported down the stairs and stacked among the others. "You emptied this out?" the movers asked later in the day, before hefting the dresser up, revealing depressions in the carpet where the legs had stood for years. "You didn't have to," they said. "But that's fine." The taller one nodded to the other, and they went around the corner and out into the hall, leaving her alone in the quiet room. There she waited while they emptied the rest of the house. She listened to the shuffling of boxes and shouted directives and squeaking of sneakers, rubbing a toe over the indentations in the carpet to fluff up the flattened nap, until one of the men peeked in, smiled tiredly, and said they were all set. ♦

02/28/2014

Inside, it was not at all what you would expect. There was none of the rain or thunder or howling as in the simulations we'd been disciplined with for weeks. How to explain? The ground, the air: it was all yellow. A wash of it, on every surface, so that to navigate within the space I had to feel my way around, grope the landscape blindly and backtrack whenever I ran into a barrier. I radioed the station. I asked, are you sure I'm in the right place? Yes. Coordinates are correct. Is it supposed to be... Sorry? Repeat that? Hold on, I said. I'd stubbed my toe on something. A rock, no—a handle. It lifted up and over, and I slipped down into the cavity below. Underneath, it was warmer and just as bright, and the air was tinged with the scent of burnt cotton. Of molten metal. Of decaying fruit. Maybe we'd gotten there too late. But I heard something then: the muted warble of a whippoorwill, as if muffled under layers of cloth.E-2096? Yes. Here. Report your status, please. I blinked and there she was, crouched in front of me. Her tiger-striped feathers were ruffled. I had been mistaken, but not far off. Come here, I whispered. She hopped backward. My radio crackled and the little beast hopped again—and though they never believed me later on, she looked me up and down and laughed. Nice try, she sang, and flew away, until she was only a speck high in the yellow horizon. ♦

01/31/2014

In the beginning there was a crackle, a spark, phones that never stopped buzzing, an extraordinary kiss while passing through a covered bridge, parties at which several of her old friends cared to comment, "Look how happy you are! What a change from last year," which embarrassed her, though not as much as when her mother took him aside on Labor Day weekend – God knows what she said to him – despite that, months later, there he was kneeling on the frozen leaves at Carson Park, and after that day every conversation somehow ended up being about the cost of flowers, and who would be offended if they weren't invited, and kidding-but-not-kidding about scrapping the whole thing and booking tickets to Cabo, where it could just be the two of them on the beach. And yet. There was a suspicion, a revelation, one deflating night getting him to admit his wrongdoing, then a lunch at which her oldest friend told her, "We all secretly could tell he wasn't right for you," and a slew of slow, indistinct mornings where she woke and boiled water for tea and considered the sparrows through the window as they pecked the soft grass, watching them until she was alright again, which took both less and more time than she expected, because there was always something that reminded her of him – certain idioms, his brand of shampoo – but, finally, it had been long enough, and she said yes to a man who asked for her phone number, missing his call that night, calling him back the next, talking late, laughing at a coincidence they had discovered; they had grown up half a dozen blocks from each other. "So, this Friday?" he asked. In the end it was only one date; they would be friends, they saw, and that was all. It was alright with her. There would be another. When she drove home she took the long way, passing through the covered bridge and easing up off the gas pedal to stretch the seconds out, the resounding echo carrying her forward. ♦

01/10/2014

I came galloping over Strawberry Hill in a fit of anger. Those dopes had gone on without me again (how many times did I have to tell them that I slept standing up, that I often looked awake when I wasn't?) but when I crested the hill I could see them out there belly-high in the bowing grass. The Palomino was still out in front, his body golden in the warm light. He had tried to get the rest of us to call him Captain and failed; the only reason we were following him at all was because he said he knew where the Great Field was, or at least he had heard of the landmarks one follows to get there. Who were we to argue? We didn't know any better. We just knew we wanted to get there. Among our group was a Clydesdale who, it was rumored, could haul eight times his own weight; a handsome but temperamental Thoroughbred; a sarcastic pony from the petting zoo upstate; and a few Appaloosas, one of which I thought had a particularly lovely coat, and thus far she had been the only one to make conversation with me, to ask about the stable I had come from. She was sweet, you know? Okay. Okay. So maybe I had a crush on her. Maybe that was why I wasn't breaking from the group and trying to find the Great Field on my own. What we had heard – what we had all been told from foalhood – was that if you could find it, you would never have to leave. In the Great Field there was uninterrupted land that stretched so far you would always tire before reaching the edge of it, there were songbirds that came twice a week to report the news of the world, there were occasionally young children who wandered into the field to offer apples from the nearby orchard, the fruit hacked in half, the juice so sweet and fragrant. The horses back home had warned each one of us not to go. It was all equine lore, they said. It was the stuff of movies. What do you say to that? All you can do is shrug, I suppose. When I left, I left before dawn, and I left deep hoof prints in the dry earth.

11/08/2013

As she does every weekend, the roommate brings home something new from the lab. She is standing in your bedroom doorway, pinching a diamond-shaped pill between her thumb and forefinger. "This one's called Liveforever, for the time being," she says, "Personally, I think the name's dumb, but you know how the marketing people are." She brings it to you. In your hand, it looks even smaller. It's a shade of yellow that reminds you of spring, of wildflowers.
"Any tests?"
"Yes. Yesterday. So far, so good." She laughs. "I mean, they're estimating a very, very tiny percentage of people will experience a side effect. Like, an infinitesimal amount. One out of a million, give or take."
"The side effect being?"
"Well, you kind of... your body just... freezes up, is the best way to put it, I guess. But your mind still works – you don't die."
"Oh," you say. You set it down on the table. You both stare at it.
"Come on," she says. "That scared you?"
"I'm saving it for later. With dinner."
"You don't need to take it with food. Just–" Her hand reaches out, but you beat her to it, thanks to that dosage of Quikreflex she gave you last week.
"I thought we had a deal," she says, frowning. The pill is in your closed hand, and she is standing so close to you, you can see the constellation of freckles running across her chin. "Are you... breaking... our deal?" It's been so long since you first moved in, since you explained your situation. You remember what will happen if you don't, and so you do. You open your hand. The pill is chalky at first, and then sweet, and then dissolves as it goes down, breaking apart into a million pieces, into every inch of your being.

10/25/2013

We were six, seven, eight and a half, and ten, and we went everywhere together. We stayed up way past our bedtimes. We always looked both ways. We knew Where the Sidewalk Ends by heart. We were constantly looking for moonbirds. We never wanted the night to end, but there was always another one lifting up from the horizon. We were unprepared at our piano lessons. We all broke our wrists the same year. We played sardines and almost locked ourselves in the cellar. We saw old Mrs. Abrams accidentally run over our beagle, and we cried in our separate bedrooms into faded pinstripe pillowcases. In early spring we swam farther than anyone thought we could, and climbed out of the pool shivering, grinning through the dripping water. You took us to our favorite place on earth that summer. We were wild. We met the girls in the rental cabin next door. One of us got his heart broken, and the rest of us just laughed at the poor sap, though secretly we'd gotten our hearts broken too. We came back home and wrote our names inside stacks of spiral notebooks. We were at the end of the bus route and we never sat together. The girls at school were pretty, but they were nothing like those girls at the lake. We were so excited for Christmas that we couldn't get to sleep. We were each other's lookouts and peeked at our meticulously wrapped gifts. We were getting good at lying. We were difficult, we were territorial, we were jealous. We tried to tell you all sorts of things but could not always find the right words. We were just trying our best. Even when we were older, the feeling always stayed with us. Whenever we were with each other, the space in our hearts no longer felt so cavernous.

10/04/2013

At six o'clock on a foggy October morning, Ellis finished burying the previous day's bottles in the empty half acre behind the courthouse. He'd begun the task at sundown the evening before, thinking that he was allowing himself plenty of time, that surely he'd get to bed by his usual hour. They were small bottles, after all, and didn't need to be buried deep. But the soil was harder here than elsewhere in town, and, though he tried not to, he couldn't stop himself from holding each bottle up to the moonlight to attempt a peek before setting it into the earth.
"You been out there all night, El?" his wife asked, when he was back at the farmhouse, finally undressed and sinking into the bed beside her. Her eyes remained closed as she spoke, her voice muddy through sleepiness.
"No," he said, "I've been home a while."
He waited until her snoring resumed and then he shut his eyes. By eight thirty he'd need to be up again. There was so much left to do in town. All the house calls to make, consultations to give, bottles to collect. He thought of all those secrets under the turned earth, trapped inside the bottles the size of a child's fist. Some of them, when held up to the moonlight, had revealed themselves. But most had not. There was only one he didn't bother holding up, because it was his own. That bottle he buried last, and buried deeper than the rest, tamping down the coarse red dirt until it looked like it had never been disturbed in the first place.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I work on my novel. Read the rest of the stories here...

09/06/2013

Their taxi has been driving for days, against a backdrop of dunes, when at last the makeshift tents come into view. In the backseat Sunny has a temperature of 102, and the pale purple spots down his legs are no longer turning white when his mother presses on them. "Just a little further, sweat pea," she whispers into his warm ear. The car goes over a bump, and her head inadvertently knocks against his. But he doesn't cry, or even whimper; he just looks at her with his drowsy, wandering eyes.
They are not allowed inside the tents. A series of signs leads them along a winding path to a steep hill, where the mother has to stop and catch her breath before going on. Sunny is heavy in her arms. Hot and heavy, and far too quiet. But there on the other side of the hill, where the sand gives way to pale tall grass, is one last tent with its flaps tied back.
"I don't know what's wrong with him," she says. There are two women who take him from her. They nod and turn their backs toward her. "I feel kind of crazy coming here, but..."
"He'll be fine," one of them says. They have set him down inside the tent, washed his legs, told him something in their soft, braided language. A silvery glow appears in one of their hands, and they begin.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

08/23/2013

For my twelfth birthday we spent a weekend on Woodley, a mossy oblong island that lays just off the coast of Washington. I had been there only once before, but remembered nothing besides the way shadows fell in eerie shapes across the dark winding road. This time, what struck me was the abundance of neighborliness. Without fail, every car coming from the opposite direction waved hello; in the grocery store, we waited in line for twice as long as we would have back home due to the prolonged conversations carried on between the cashier and other customers. My sister, sighing loudly in protest, only received a grin from the old woman in front of us. The old woman was buying hardly anything. Three apricots, that was all – and every time the conveyor belt halted, the pieces of fruit bumped into each other gently, as if kissing. After dinner my parents and sister sang to me and then we ate the cake that had been purchased from the slow grocery store. I unwrapped gifts while sitting on the hotel bed. Later, asleep under the floral print comforter, I woke to a pair of frantic feet kicking at my calves. I tried to shake my sister out of sleep. "Hey," I whispered forcefully. "You're having a bad dream." She wouldn't wake. But she did stop kicking, just before rolling away from me and pulling most of the comforter with her. The next day we drove the circumference of the island. My mother took photos through her open window, lowering the camera from her face only when we stopped at a designated lookout point. There was no one there to take our photo – it being the one time that a friendly islander was nowhere to be found – and so my mother set the timer and positioned the camera on the roof of the car. In the photograph, as it turned out, we're all cut off from the chins down, but the view behind us remains immaculate: a breadth of satiny water, ferries cutting across it in diagonals, and the faraway foothills that stretch for miles.

08/09/2013

The McCullen girl was a beauty, a memory, a murmur, a sound in the dark when the moon was out. She had been living in Saint Luna Zoo for two hundred and ten days, seventy of which had been spent with the orangutans. In the winter, as the white sky broke into snow, she wove a parka out of bits of plastic and ficus leaves, padding the inside with matted fur she had collected months before from the bottom of the cages. In the spring, when the men came to build a new lion's den, she watched them from the adjacent exhibit while giraffes wandered sleepily behind her.
"That the wild girl?" one of the men asked.
"Well, she ain't a zookeeper," another replied.
Had her presence not boosted ticket sales, and had she not nursed their only arctic fox back to health, the zoo surely would have found a way to remove her. But on the five o'clock local news, Eve Granger, president and CEO, said soberly into the camera: "She is welcome here, of course. Our home is hers." It had been almost a year by then, and still no one had gotten within conversation's reach of her. For weeks after the newscast, the sky was clear, and the moon was as bright and big as you could hope for. It casted a silvery light over her figure moving down the path as she returned to the orangutans, who slept noiselessly through the long, silky night, and who awoke the next morning to the unmatchable happiness of seeing their young friend again.

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The first line of this story was inspired by the opening line of one of my favorite books, Cannery Row by John Steinbeck: "Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream." I almost can't believe this is my fiftieth Fiction Friday... (!) ...thank you for all the encouragement along the way.

07/26/2013

At the end of July I drove up to Pulgio, where my great grandfather had lived. The trees were as thick and green as in storybooks, the forest floor soft with moss, the air misty and cool. The entire village came out of their houses, most of them weary-eyed. "Hello," I said in their language, and their chests relaxed. I held out a photograph of my great grandfather's face. I was prepared to explain myself, but they understood right away. They pointed up the sloped landscape to a red stone house. It was the only one left unlit. I had brought matches; inside, I struck one, and navigated by its light until a lamp came into sight. By lamplight, I saw the layers of dust coating it all, and the lack of footprints. They had not disturbed anything inside, though it had been uninhabited for years.
They stood in the doorway behind me. "You can have it all," one of the elders said. "What was his is now yours."
"I'll only take a few things," I said. "I just came up here to see it, mostly."
"Take a few now," the elder said, speaking slowly to make sure I could understand the dialect. "And next time you come, you'll take a few more."
I noticed, then, the birds by their feet, multicolored and curious. I vaguely remembered a story from my childhood, but I could not remember how it ended.
Another one of the elders scooped up a bird, and held it out. "For you," he said.
"I can't possibly..." I refused, but by the end of the day I was driving back home with the bird in a box, a row of air holes punched in the side. Its wings quietly fluttered against the cardboard. "It will be happy with you," they'd explained, before I left. "But if you don't like it, just set it free. Do it on a clear night, and it will be fine. It will come back to us. You might think it's too far, but it knows the way home."

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

07/19/2013

"Now this," she says. "This, Bradley, is something special." We're standing in my studio. It's either really late, or really early, depending on how you look at it. I have wet clay streaked all the way up to my elbows. I don't like being called Bradley; only one other person has ever called me that. "That one's not even done," I protest. I try to pull her away, refocus her attention on the wall of finished pieces. There are thirty of them, complete, all named, any of them ready to go home with her in her old white truck. But she is drawn to the misshapen beast in the corner. She ducks her head and steps inside. It makes her skin look neon. "Wow," she says, the word echoing out of the air holes. "What's that smell?" "Like I said," I call out. "It's not finished."

She insists. She begs. She wins in the end, and I help her load it into her truck. She says they can probably get two grand for it, maybe three. "I have a client," she says, sitting in the driver's seat now, buckling her seatbelt, "who kills for this kind of stuff. You should see his house. Better than museums, you know?" When she pulls out of the unpaved driveway she sticks a hand out the window, waving goodbye. The cloud of dust she's kicked up settles, but slowly.

I sleep in the studio that night, in the corner that it was in. The floor there is still warm. In the morning, I know, I'll get a phone call. "Bradley," she'll say. "Something's not right." "Maybe the lighting?" I'll suggest, knowing it's not. But you have to let some people figure it out on their own. "No," she'll say. "That's not it. Listen, can you come down?" I'll go. "Give me five days," I'll say when I arrive. It will be waiting there for me, in the middle of the gallery, the smell of it permeating the air. Not bad, exactly; just uncommon. I'll make them lock the gallery doors. Wave them away from the window. Then I'll place my hands on the clay, and push my thumbs in, and feel the shape of it move.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

07/05/2013

Once, when she was a five, maybe six, she saw a motorcyclist hit by a car. The way his leg bent at that wrong angle, like a doll's could, and the muffled high-pitched exclamations of the driver of the car, muted by her mother's warm hands slipping over her ears – she would never forget that. Sprawled on the pavement, the motorcyclist's body was covered in flowers that had ejected out of his backpack. A bouquet one moment, and not the next. "Look away," she was told, and when she lowered her eyes there was a sprig of baby's breath at her feet, the tip touching the strap of her sandal.

She recalls this memory at the strangest times, like when she emerges from the doctor's office into full sunlight. While draining pasta for dinner. Or at two in the morning, after waking from a dream that immediately slips away. But, somehow, never when she walks past the buckets of baby's breath at the farmer's market, or when she parks next to a motorcycle in a parking lot. Funny how that goes. Funny, she thinks, how a lot of things go.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

06/21/2013

Was it already Berabrack season? "It has to be," my sister says, "They're everywhere. Can't drive into town without almost hitting one." Whenever they show up, they cross the street in pairs, act like they never hear you, leave their paw prints in the morning dew. At Handy Hardware, I linger in the sign aisle, considering the one that reads: Warning: Berabracks not tolerated. But what is that supposed to mean?
"How long is it going to last this time?" I ask my sister when I'm back home, standing in her bedroom doorway. I have a plastic shopping bag hooked on my finger, but she doesn't ask what's inside. She's watching the 6-inch black-and-white television on her desk, tapping it every so often to clear away static.
"Two weeks," she says. "That's what they said on TV, anyway."

At night, you can hear them squeaking gibberish to each other. Sometimes it sounds like a real word. I swear I've heard them say sayonara. And salty. I lay awake those nights, the plastic bag on my nightstand, counting the painted-over spots on the ceiling. Six nights of this. "You don't look so great," my sister says. "Can't sleep?"
"Not at all," I say. "You?"
She nods. It occurs to me that she never turns off her desktop television, and that it probably drowns out the Berabracks. I go into town again that day, but all the department stores are sold out. Backordered until August, the salesgirl informs me. They've got radios, she says, but she wouldn't recommend them.

The Berabracks are still here after two weeks. At midnight, on a Sunday, I yank a sweatshirt over my head, grab the plastic bag from my nightstand, and open the back door. There are hundreds. A few stand up on their hind legs, eyes wide at the sight of me. I open the bag. I pull out a contraption that I'm not sure I can use properly. Then I realize I don't even have to use it. I'll just show it to them. I'll shake it at them, to show them I'm serious. "It's time for you to go," I say. "So go." Then the squeaking starts again, a squeaky laughing. I swear I hear one of them say: so silly. But that night they make their way to another yard, hopping slowly, as if saying they would have done it anyway.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

06/07/2013

Life at Hotel No. 9 went like this: breakfast was served at eight o'clock, featuring Wake Up Waffles, Let's Go Eggs, and a few dozen pots of Super Extra Coffee; afterward there never failed to be at least one fist fight in the lobby, but by the time peace was made and gauze was wrapped, the reason for it had been forgotten. The pool opened at ten o'clock, but fresh towels rarely made it up from Laundry before ten thirty, and the city children had to be chased out of the deep end anyway. At noon, lunch was only eaten by those who had nothing better to do with their day; most Hotel No. 9 residents slathered on their SPF 500 and grabbed a bottle of filtered water from their mini fridge and headed into city, because for those four hours each day it never rained and the shops were open and happiness, in general, was agreed upon.

Buses took everyone back to the hotel in late afternoon. Each was equipped with a small child who plodded up and down the aisle, demanding in a quiet hiss, "Tickets to Amsterdam, tickets to New York! Only three left, and then they'll be gone forever." You had witnessed a sly exchange between one of these young scalpers and a man who, later, you realized lived down the hallway from you. After he left, no one ever saw or heard from him again. Maybe that was a good thing, but nobody else wanted to find out.

At Hotel No. 9, dinner almost always featured Sleepy Spaghetti, and sometimes Relax Me Now Soup, and once in a while an Everything's Okay Salad Bar. After dinner there were never any fist fights. There was only the slow shuffling of residents back to their rooms, and doors clicking open and shut, and television sets crackling on. Yours tended to stay off. Each night you simply said a prayer, tucked yourself into bed, and watched the moon rise through your big oval window.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

05/24/2013

We said we were there for the wedding. Palmer wedding? asked the hotel clerk. No, we said. Flynn wedding. Sure enough, there were two banquet halls, one on each end of the ground floor. "Wouldn't you hate that?" I asked Isaac. "Every time you had an anniversary, you'd be thinking, 'It's those other people's anniversary, too.' All your life." "As opposed to us," said Isaac. "I'm sure nobody else got married that day." "You know what I mean," I said. We were up in the room then, and I was counting all the wrinkles that my dress had incurred during the car ride. I brought the dress over by the window to get a better look, holding it up to the blue mid-morning light, but then I said, "Look, there they are," because I spotted their figures in the distance, out on the grassy knoll behind the hotel. "Who?" asked Isaac. "The Palmers?" I was about to say no, when it occurred to me that maybe it was the Palmers. It was too hard to be sure from this far away. All I knew was that there was someone in an ivory dress, and someone else in black. They were arguing, arms being thrown up in exasperation. Then the figure in black turned, and kicked at a rock, and left the bride standing alone, crying, on the empty hill.

All through the wedding I watched for a sign. I held my breath when they were asked Do you?, but they did not hesitate. They did their first dance, they cut the three-tiered white chocolate cake, they kissed on command when silverware clinked wine glasses. Later I snuck out, went down the long, mauve-carpeted hotel hallway, and peeked into the other banquet hall. It was, more or less, exactly the same, minus one thing. "Where's the bride?" I tried asking someone, but just then a new song came on, and my question was inaudible. I backed out of the room. Headed back down the hallway. I was halfway there when she came out of a door, holding her long ivory skirt up so she wouldn't trip. Our eyes met. "Everything okay?" I asked. She looked confused. Then she smiled, and asked, "What do you mean? Hey, you're Katie's cousin, aren't you?" "No," I said. "I'm not." "Well," she said, and looked impatiently up the hall. "Never mind," I said. "Congratulations."

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

04/19/2013

Over a number of years Helen had accumulated almost two dozen students, who cycled through her front door and then clumsily filled the house with music as she sat in a chair beside the lacquered piano bench. When a student didn't get it right after two or three tries, she moved to the edge of her seat and demonstrated the phrase on a higher octave. Sometimes the student hadn't practiced that week; those were usually the ones who were forced into the lessons (and whose mothers chose to listen in during the hour, and who tried to bargain with Helen over her weekly rate). Then there were the kids who truly wanted to be there, who practiced and thanked her and showed up on time when she arranged a recital at a retirement center in town. And then there was Karl, her only adult student, who she was in love with.
But Karl always forgot to play the E's flat, and he had an unapologetic weight to his fingers which made everything he played sound serious and sad. And there was the difficult detail, too, that he was married. Once when he opened his wallet after the lesson to write a check, a snapshot of a woman's face peeked out through a smudged plastic sleeve, staring directly at Helen. "Is that your wife?" she had asked Karl, feeling embarrassed when he said yes because her mind was already imagining what her own photograph would look like in its place.
"I'll see you next week, then?" he asked. He was heading toward the door.
"Yes," she said. "See you then."

This was a scenario she had considered: refer the students to someone else, sell the piano, throw away the sign that was out in the front yard, maybe cut her hair, or just dye it, and then go away. She would be someone else entirely, meet a man, wear a dress that clung to her hips, never again hear another beautiful sonata spoiled. She thought, vaguely, of Wyoming. Or Alaska; she had been there once, as a child. She wondered if she had a good enough winter coat. But then the next week Karl said, as he sat down on the bench, "You know, this is the highlight of my week, Helen," and that was that. She could not leave. Once he had said that, she could not do it.

At night, after hours of the house being quiet, she took a seat on the bench. She let her fingers lay on the keys for a long time before playing. Sometimes, even, for a full hour, periodically checking the clock over her shoulder. How long it felt when she was alone; how quickly it passed when Karl sat beside her. Finally, when the hour was up, she played.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

04/05/2013

When she arrived, they were tearing down the stage, packing up the equipment into hardback cases, sweeping clean the parking lot. She approached one of the sweeping men. Gently cleared her throat. 'Scuse Me, she said. Is Oleander nearby? She had a package for him, she explained, tapping the butcher paper wrapped tube tucked under her arm. The man shook his head. She kept walking. She asked another sweeper and was answered with a shrug. But he is here, right? This was met with another shrug. She almost grabbed him by the shoulder, wanting to demand a real answer. But she knew what would happen. She'd done it before, gotten into a fight, had a permanent note added to her file.
Ah: there. She spotted his feet dangling off the back of one of the semi trucks. Slowly she walked around a mound of trash – which, she noticed, was made up of a lot of crumpled Magic Fries wrappers and burnt matches and neon business cards – and went around the back of the truck, clearing her throat again, and then saying: Delivery for you, sir. I just need a signature right here... while holding out the tablet and a pen, and trying not to look directly in his eyes. When he handed back the tablet his hand briefly touched hers. His skin was warm. He mumbled something that sounded like a thank you. Or maybe it was: now leave. You never knew with him.
She turned to go. She walked away from the truck, passed the sweepers, and looked back only once: just long enough to see the bright light glowing in the corner of her eye, and hear the laughing that echoed afterward.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

03/22/2013

Serge was always telling me useless facts about food: did I know that Worcestershire sauce was made from anchovies, bones and all? Had I ever heard that coconut water, in an emergency, could be used as a substitute for blood plasma? They were the sort of arbitrary statements that sounded like bad pick-up lines coming from anyone else's lips, but when Serge said them, in his honey-thick Belgian voice, they were somehow endearing. That, and the fact that his enthusiasm was genuine. There was all this stuff out there that nobody knew. It was like he was discovering it before anyone else.
"Guess what food dynamite is made of," said Serge one evening. He was on the computer, reading one of a seemingly endless supply of More Amazing Facts About Food! articles online.
"I haven't a clue," I said. He waited for me to guess. I shrugged.
"Peanuts," he said, after a beat, his eyes widening.
"I don't believe that," I said. "I think someone just makes some of this stuff up."
He motioned for me to read it with my own two eyes, as if that would convince me. I leaned over his shoulder and read, adding a little ah-ha at the end. I kissed the side of his face, just above the jagged line of stubble. I said: I'm going to order in. You want the usual?

If I'm counting right, I haven't seen him for seven years. But I still remember those facts he rattled off. His voice recites them to me when I grocery shop, or times like now, when I'm standing barefoot in my stuffy kitchen preparing beef brisket. A bottle of Worcestershire sits open on the countertop, sauce clinging to the lip. Anchovies... says Serge in my head. This image I can't get out of my mind: all those fish and their glistening thin bodies and their tiny eyes, an endless number of them swimming against the current.Anchovy bones, he whispers.
"Stop," I insist, trying to forget. I picture Serge on a train, and the train speeding away into the distance, until it's just a speck. A trick my therapist taught me, if you have to know. At first I'd been skeptical. I'd asked: but what if the train comes back? And my therapist had said: well, maybe it will. In fact, it probably will. But at least it's gone for a while.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

03/08/2013

Every Saturday afternoon our stepmother drove the four of us to the ice arena in Somersville. If you got in trouble that week, you'd still get to come, but you weren't allowed to skate. Take Gemma, who'd stolen a ten dollar bill out of dad's wallet: she'd been properly scolded, had to pay him twenty dollars back, and at the arena she was forced to watch us from the benches shielded by sheets of plexiglass. "This is so stupid," she sulked, when I stepped out of the rink to peel off one of my three sweaters. "Why did I even have to come?"
But we both knew the answer to that. It wasn't really about us skating. It was about our father having some peace and quiet in the house. He'd been working on his novel for almost a year, and these Saturday afternoons were the only time he truly got any work done. Each time we got back from Somersville, the stack of typed pages on his desk had grown the slightest bit taller. The stack was held down by a paperweight that looked like a crumpled up sheet of legal paper, a Christmas gift from the year before.
"Can I read it?" I'd asked once, and he'd said, "When it's published," then shooed me out of the room.
But how could I not? I convinced myself that I had a right to. And if you thought about it for long enough, I had an obligation to read it, really, because what if our house happened to catch fire in the middle of the night, and he wasn't able to save his manuscript, and he'd be forced to reconstruct it from memory? If I read it, too, his task of rewriting wouldn't be so daunting. I could help him out. So there: it was practically a necessity.

In the end, Gemma wormed her way into my plan, of course. Getting involved in things was her specialty. After two hours of searching we found the key to the study, went in, snatched the first twenty pages, and read them as quickly as we could. Then the next twenty, and the next twenty. We were done with what he had written so far in just enough time to put everything back in its place. "The kids in the book..." I said to Gemma, grabbing her by the arm before she ducked back into her room, "That's not – that's not us, is it?" She understood what I meant: that the kids sounded a lot like us – ice skater aficionados, four sisters. But these kids in his novel were awful. They were bratty. They whined all the time. One of them had even gotten hit by a car because she didn't check for traffic before running out into the street. Who would write something like that? Gemma shrugged. It could be, she said. But probably not. "Don't worry about it," she said. "It's just fiction, after all."

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

02/22/2013

She was gone by the time he came back. She'd left the map on the countertop, creased and faded green and all in French, but it was the best he was going to get, and it was better than the ones he'd gotten in the past. The girl had spoken all in French, too, come to think of it – no wonder he hadn't understood a word. Le Trésor, she kept saying, pointing to an unmarked point on the map. Ici. Ici.
Where she had disappeared to, he hadn't a clue. This kept happening, people appearing, people disappearing. Giving him directions. Telling him things in foreign languages, handing him keys that disintegrated after a single use, sending him on and on. The last girl had led him through a parking lot and pointed, expressionlessly, to a little red car, which was now idling out in the driveway in front of the house.
He left the house, map in hand. He flattened it out on the passenger's seat, backed out of the driveway, started down the endless switchbacks. Finally they spit out onto a long, straight highway lined with cacti. According to the map, there were close to a hundred miles of it. Le Trésor, the girl had kept saying. It seemed like it should be so obvious. And yet.
It was almost dawn when he reached the end of the highway. It ended, just like that: there was highway, and then there was not. Where there should have been asphalt, there was a door. He killed the engine. Sucked in the hot, dry air of the desert. Walked to the door. He walked around it, too – but it was the same on both sides. At eye level there was a small gold placard engraved with the words Please knock and below that another one that read Dr. Woo, MD. He raised a fist to knock. For a moment – hardly even a full moment, more like half a moment – he wondered if he shouldn't. Then he let his fist fall on the echoing wood, knocking, knocking.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

02/08/2013

Day one. "It goes like this," Collax says. "You lift up this flap, and then you punch in your greencode – you do know your greencode, don't you? They gave that to you in orientation, right? I thought so. Punch it in here, then pull on the lever by your left hand. No, your other your left hand – uh huh, there you go, champ. Voilà. You're in." The screen spanning the length of the room flickers and focuses. Colors fade in. From this angle, pedestrians look like beetles. Worse, you think you might recognize the neighborhood. This concerns you. Collax misinterprets the grimace. "Don't worry," he says. "You don't get to run it on your own until you log fifty hours. At minimum."
Day nine. Eighty hours logged, thanks to that mishap at the saw factory on Wednesday. Collax stops by, slurping from a styrofoam cup. "You'll get coffee privileges around week six," he says. "Sugar privileges a week or two after that. How's the hood?" It's alright, you say. It's under control.
Day eighteen. Or is it day nineteen? At noon, an announcement feeds through the ceiling speakers: the annual company barbecue is officially set for June the thirty-fourth. As always, the voice adds, please bring your own plates. Collax never comes by anymore, but you bump into him in the breakroom. "Hey champ," he says. "Day twenty one, already, huh? It flies by."
Day forty. The barbecue has come and gone. While the meat was grilling, you cracked a couple well-timed jokes, flattered the right people. After that they upgraded you to a room in the primary hall, the same rank as Collax. Now, instead of a neighborhood, you've got a whole city. You've got six hundred thousand people, and they look like specks on the screen instead of beetles. They all look exactly the same, except for – well, except for that one right there. A flick of your wrist and the screen zooms in. It's a boy. He's looking up at you, and he's holding a sign. Hello, it reads, in blocky black handwriting. Hello, up there.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the rest of the stories here...

01/25/2013

At first it sounded like tissue paper being crumpled, big sheets of it, and Zola wondered, Mama's wrapping presents? before remembering that her mother had gone out to the hairdresser and wouldn't be back until four that afternoon. Though she was alone in the house, she crept noiselessly down the stairs toward the living room. Once or twice she stopped and just listened. If she tried hard enough she could pick out the individual parts of the sound. Like... yes, there. One sharp pop. Then another and another, in quick succession, so that when they were all strung together it sounded like a single unbroken sound.
No more stairs left. She crossed the living room and the sound grew louder, the way music often did during a long, sad song. What was the word for that? She had learned it in school. Mr. Olstead had scrunched up his forehead when he said it, his eyebrows wriggling like caterpillars. Ah, crescendo. That was it.
At the window, she saw what it was. The trees. The trees, all of them. The trees out in front of the house – and as far as she could see, when she pressed her left cheek against the cool water-stained window – all of them were blossoming audibly. Already there were creamy white-and-pink flowers painted all over the magnolia tree in the front yard. Spring would not wake lethargically this year. It was coming all at once, arriving before she could hardly comprehend it.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the read of the stories here...

01/18/2013

They had promised her a planet: one warm, white planet that she could build however she pleased. The air was clean and the land was fertile. She could cultivate it, if she wanted to. They'd been watching her for some time and took note of how often she paused on one of her walks to look with envy at a neighbor's well-manicured garden. She could trade all this – here they motioned with their long graceless arms to mean her current situation – she could trade it all for a new life. She could have six seasons, extinct animals reconstructed, her favorite music infused into the air. Anything.
That had been a week ago; now she stood on the slick surface in disbelief. She was unsure where to start. She knew they were watching, and she had to resist the urge to cry.
"You're just adjusting," one of their voices said, slipping through the air. "But there's no rush. Try something small."
She nodded. She murmured, "Maybe a lawn, then." It sprouted from the white surface, richly green. "And a small house. A one-bedroom house." When it appeared, it unfolded from the ground, creaking and stretching as if it had been there for ages just waiting to be called on. She went inside. It smelled of lemon, but both the short metal refrigerator and the cabinets lining the nearest wall were bare. In the middle of the house was a bed made up in gray linens. She'd take a nap, she decided, and then start figuring things out. This life, like the last one, would take some time to get used to.

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Fiction Friday is an outlet for experimentation while I slowly work on becoming a novelist. Read the read of the stories here...

12/28/2012

Even if the week had been slow at the restaurant, there never failed to be a line come Saturday morning. At eight o'clock the oldest Munro boy flipped the sign in the window and the middle Munro boy pushed the last of the refilled ketchup bottles across the small square tables by the back windows. The youngest boy, Victor, sat on a high stool in the kitchen watching his father whisk the eggs into a froth in a metal bowl. Mr. Munro had never liked being the cook, but his wife had insisted because he was good at it. He did not deny this. But what he would have preferred was to actually converse with the customers. He often fantasized about how different it would be. Instead of donning a grease-smeared apron, he would wear a dark crisp button-up shirt, ironed smooth each morning. He would spend the day asking the diners, "Everything to your liking?" and lean in gently over the table, resting a hand on the man's shoulder and smiling to the wife. He would offer wrapped mints to the restless children. At the very least, he was convinced that his charm would bring in more customers on the slow quiet weekdays. "That Mr. Munro," he imagined them saying, "He's such a nice man; he runs such a lovely restaurant."

It would come, eventually. The boys got older, and while two of them went away to out-of-state universities on scholarships, the youngest stayed with his parents. Victor had spent so many years watching his father cook that when he finally picked up a whisk to ready the eggs for that morning's omelettes, he knew the entire menu by heart. It was never difficult for him, and unlike his father, he desired to stay isolated from the dining room. He was taken by surprise the first time his father poked his head into the kitchen to relay compliments from an elderly couple who had been dining at the restaurant for years. "Oh, that's–" stumbled Victor, wiping his forehead. He seemed to have forgotten about the diners entirely. "That's nice," he finally said. "That's awfully nice of them."

Victor had a boy of his own a few years later, and he brought him into the restaurant and sat him up on the high stool in the kitchen as he himself had sat so many years before. "Do you want to learn?" he offered, but the boy shook his head no. Maybe in time, Victor thought. He cracked the egg into the metal bowl, and then another and another, and for a moment paused with the last weightless shell in his hand before setting it next to the others.

11/30/2012

It had been a tradition since before Suze married into the family, and this whole time she had kept her mouth shut, because who was she, really, to say anything about it? So she stood by, her face half-buried behind a scarf, watching the boys slide and slip down the thick coating of snow, whooping with laughter, clambering back up the hill and sometimes racing each other to the top because everything, she had noticed, everything was a competition. Nelson, the younger one, had almost choked on a piece of zucchini the evening before because he'd been trying to clear his plate faster than his brother. And once the commotion had settled down, he had gone right back to shoveling food into his mouth with even more fervor, as if what had just happened was already shed from his memory. She could hardly believe it.
As she stood out in the cold, Suze watched Nelson more closely than she watched the others, thinking that maybe if she did, nothing bad could happen. If she kept her eyes on him, it would be impossible for his sled to careen off its path and head straight into the maple tree that stood near the edge of the yard. It would be impossible for Nelson to slide down the hill with so much momentum that he would skid out into the street where the cars, though driving slowly, were not really driving that slowly. If it had been her son, she would have said something. Or if she hadn't started those fights at the previous family gathering, she would have said something. Yet she had promised. "Please, no scenes this year," her husband had begged of her, as they pulled into his parents' driveway. "Anything for you," Suze had replied, meaning it but not being able to look fully at him.
Now Nelson was waving to her from the bottom of the hill. Most of the family had gone back inside the house. It had to be her that Nelson was signaling to. She called out, "What's wrong? Are you okay?" feeling the panic reverberate in her voice. Then she realized that all he was doing was inviting her to join them. He feels sorry for me, Suze thought, calling out that she was just fine as she was. Yet saying it reminded her of how awful it was to be standing still in the cold. She rubbed her arms, blew hot air into the scarf and closed her eyes a moment at the pleasure of warmth, as slight as it was. When she reopened them, Nelson was almost back up at the top of the hill. Closer now, she could see the joy in his face. "Hey," he said. "Watch me, okay?" And before she could reply he took off, the snow flying out from behind him, and Suze kept her eyes on him, kept him straight and unwavering.

11/16/2012

After following The Indigo Man for three weeks, there were two truths I knew about him. The first was that he never left his apartment on Wednesdays. On those days he had Chinese food delivered around noon, then let the hours pass while he sat in his lumpy maroon recliner watching TV. Across the street, through my binoculars, all I could see were the changes in his expression, how his face morphed from laughter to boredom to a drowsiness brought on by the now empty cartons of takeout. Okay, I figured, so it's just his lazy day. But once, when he left his medicine cabinet open, it provided me a reflection of the TV he was laughing at. But there were no daytime talk shows, no overzealous infomercials. The TV wasn't even on.
The second truth I knew about him was that he spent the other six days a week making deliveries. He went on foot, a bag slung over his right shoulder and a wool cap on his head that he would periodically remove and peer into, as if verifying something. On State Street, he made six deliveries, skipping only the house with the orange cat sitting on the stoop. Out from his bag came small packages, tied in twine, which he slipped into the mail slots. Forty or fifty deliveries later, the sun had gone down, and I was tired of crouching behind bushes and park benches, and The Indigo Man retired to his favorite bar.
Three weeks of this and I was ready to give up – and then it happened. One of his little packages slipped from his bag and landed on the sidewalk, face up. I emerged from behind a dumpster, where I'd been holding my breath, almost turning blue, and dashed for the package. "For You And You Only" was written where the return address would have normally been. I flipped it over, and ran my thumb under the flap. But a voice said, "Hey," and the Indigo Man had realized his mistake, had turned back and was standing in front of me. For the first time, I was afraid of him. But all he did was hold out his hand, and wait for me to give back what was not mine.

11/09/2012

She is born in the winter. It snows that year, and even more so the next year, like thick frosting on a cake, and the winter after that they move to Monroe, where her father has a new job waiting for him. Every day he comes home smelling of flour and cinnamon. She is four when her baby brother is born and nine when he has his accident. Gentle now, says her mother, when she hugs her brother, newly home from the hospital. After a while the scars on his legs aren't so noticeable. When she is ten, her father brings home a dog from the shelter. She insists on naming him Lady and cannot be convinced otherwise. He sleeps at the foot of her bed every night except for one week out of the year when they are on summer vacation. Those days they spend driving down the coast with the windows down and her hair whipping across her face. She collects sand from every beach they go to, scooping it into little vials and labeling them with tape. In the middle of a fight with her brother, he smashes one of the vials on the living room floor, specks of sand everywhere.

Then she is fifteen and telling people to call her Anna, not Annabelle; then fifteen and a half and she almost crashes the high school's Driver's Ed car, her hands sweaty and slipping on the steering wheel; then sixteen and sitting in a dark movie theater beside Alex Atwood, hardly breathing when he runs his hand over hers. She writes everything down in lined journals, which her brother steals from her nightstand drawer and reads, hooting with laughter, until he gets to the part about him. When she is eighteen she wins a prize for a poem she has written, and her mother hangs a copy of it in the house, which embarrasses her only slightly more than having to read it in front of the senior class at graduation. We all were once young, it begins. Nobody in the house remembers to flip the calendar hanging in the kitchen, and it lingers on July as the months go on. Then, suddenly, she is coming home for the first time from college. Her mother has put new sheets on her bed; how large and luxurious it feels now, after being away. Her father comes home from work, still smelling of flour and cinnamon, and turns on the local news while dinner is bubbling on the stovetop. The weatherman is predicting snow, days of it, the first flakes likely falling in a few hours.

10/26/2012

The dream was always the same: it was almost November, and he was ice fishing with his grandfather, and the baby sharks were circling under the thick cloudy ice beneath their boots. He was feeling cheerful, despite the wind numbing the tips of his ears and the unscratchable itch creeping along the middle of his back; these were things that ordinarily irritated him and made him morose. But that day he was feeling good. An envelope had come that morning. From her. There was a photograph, and she moved in it as he rotated it back and forth. This part of the dream he especially liked. At one angle, she looked down shyly, and at another angle, she looked straight ahead with the slightest smile. She was standing beneath a palm tree, an open air market blurry behind her.
On the back, she had written: still waiting for you.
He had never made it past that point. Always the alarm, or Judith nudging him awake, or the kids crawling over him, squealing Daddy, or even when there was nothing to wake him: it just stopped, like the film had run out.Do you ever have recurring dreams? he asked Ray, over their nightly beers at Smokey's.What, said Ray, you mean like... oh, for crying out loud! He'd been looking up at the television above the bar. Then he wiped the corners of his mouth, and turned back.What were you saying? Ray asked.Never mind, he said. Nothing important.
The sharks he understood. There had been a field trip to the zoo when he was in grade school and an incident with a zookeeper that had turned out to be nothing, really, but had still scared him, being so young. But the rest confused him. He had never known his grandfather. Couldn't even say a single thing about the old man, so what was he doing showing up in his sleep?
And, of course, there was the girl. Still waiting for him, but where? But there was nothing more to be seen in the dream. What he had been given was all there was. So in his waking life, he looked. He looked for her when they went on vacation in Santa Monica. He looked for her in crowds at the mall while his wife shopped for Christmas presents. He kept his eyes open. It was all he could do, until it was night again, and time to sleep.

10/19/2012

After the man in coveralls pinpointed us on the map and gave me directions ("Just keep going straight," he'd said, and I'd replied with, "Well, that's easy enough to remember,") I went back to the car, which was idling with Lynn in the passenger seat. She was staring out into the moonlit fields of red wildflowers that ran down the length of the highway. Not pretty ones; just weeds, really, that would scratch your legs and get caught in your hair if you tried, let's say, to run through them.
While I was asking for directions, she'd turned the radio to oldies. I turned it back. I reminded her that the driver picked the station; wasn't that one of the first things we'd agreed on when planning this trip?
"Right," she said, rolling her eyes. "You and all your rules."
While I drove, she dozed off. She made little whimpering sounds as she slept, and then one long, squeaky snore that I couldn't stop myself from laughing at, and then finally she fell into a silent sleep. A half hour went by, and nothing – the road, the moon, the radio music – seemed to change.
Then, so quickly: I felt wobbly, like I'd been spun and then halted still. In the next moment, the sensation was gone. I reached over to shake Lynn awake, but she pushed my hand away, laughed, asked what I was doing.
"When did you wake up?" I asked, and she gave me an odd look.
In the distance, there was a light squeezing out of the dark. It developed into a small gas station, where a man in coveralls came out to greet me. He pulled out a map like an illusionist pulling a trick from his sleeve. He had dirt under his fingernails, the kind you get from really digging down deep in the earth.
"Do I know you?" I asked. "I have the weirdest feeling..."
But he interrupted me. "Just keep following the road," he said, tracing his forefinger along the thick purple highway line on the map. Then he raised his finger up off the page and pointed into the darkness ahead.
"Are you sure?" I asked. "I'm worried that we missed it. It wasn't supposed to take this long."
"Like I said," he repeated, "Just keep going straight."
"Okay," I said, and heard myself say, the words coming on their own: "That's easy enough to remember."
Back in the car, Lynn had been fiddling with the radio, and it was humming oldies. I switched it, and then we drove on, looking out over the dark fields of wildflowers that were unlike anything we'd seen before.

10/05/2012

Wait for a windy day. Heat up a little butter in the tallest stockpot you own, then dig out the biggest onion you can find. In all likelihood it will be hiding at the very back of your cupboard; the good onions always do that. Chop it up with a recently sharpened knife and toss the pieces into the pot. While the onion cooks, read a few pages from a book you haven't touched in ages, and if you like the way it sounds in your head, tear them out, crinkle them up, and add them to the onions. Don't worry about the missing pages; you'll remember how the story goes.
If you have any tiny potatoes, toss those into the pot, along with anything else with a thick skin, like that ugly little squash your neighbor handed to you over his fence, or the persimmons that have been sleeping for a week in your fruit bowl. Cook everything until it is so translucent it's hard to see it at all. Fill the remaining space with chicken stock, or vegetable stock, or the rainwater that has been coming down for weeks. Herbs are happy to be included here, a handful knotted tightly with twine and dunked to the bottom of the pot. By the time you've done all of this, it will be evening, and you will be getting hungrier than you thought possible. Maybe, then, there will be a knock at the door, an old friend. He will come with a loaf of hot bread under his arm, which you will tear pieces from with tingling hands. You will lean against the kitchen counter and talk about how quickly this year has gone by. He will check on the soup for you, and season it, and ask where you keep your fine china.
When the soup is ready, the whole house will be fragrant, and nearly all of the bread will be gone. You will tear the remaining piece in half and ladle the soup into porcelain bowls, licking a drop that lands on your thumb. Your friend will tell you a story about an island he once traveled to that was covered in fruit trees. "We could go there together," he offers. "There's plenty of time." It's past midnight when you finish your meal. Your guest has to leave, and so you change into your pajamas, and wash the makeup off your face, and pour the rest of the soup into tupperware to stack in the freezer. This way the soup will keep until you need it, even if that is years from now.

09/21/2012

The thing that drives Zeek the craziest about his mother is that she's always talking to everyone. It doesn't matter if they're in the supermarket, or at Powell Street Laundry, or in the waiting room at Dr. Pinsky's. His mother talks to anyone within earshot. She asks strangers where she can find a nice pair of boots like theirs, or informs them about how bad the traffic was on the drive in, or tells them some humdrum anecdote from her past. When she runs out of the truth, she moves into the imaginative parts of her mind. "I was in the paper once," she might say. "Got my picture taken and everything!" And hearing this, Zeek blushes and pulls on his mother's sweatshirt, whispering, Mom, Mom, stop please.
Other times, he can't stop her, like when he's sitting slumped outside of the womens' dressing room at Clark's, and his mother is telling the dressing room attendant about the diet she's been on for weeks and weeks, though in truth they've had hot fudge sundaes for the last three evenings in a row. There is even still a chocolate stain on the front of Zeek's shirt in the shape of a fox. But his mother is saying, "You get used it, after a while, all the calorie counting," while zipping up the floor length evening gown that she'd carried so happily into the dressing room.
"You must have a special event coming up, I imagine," says the attendant.
"You won't believe this," Zeek's mother says, "But I won tickets to a movie premiere. Hollywood! Here I'm in my forties, and I've never been. But with this dress... it's alright if my son comes in for a second, isn't it? Zeek, honey, come tell me what you think." And though he doesn't want to, he goes in. It feels like stepping through into another world, like being caught in some large, soft web. He sees her standing in front of a three-way mirror at the end of the narrow hallway, blue sequins shimmering all over. Her face is lit up, her cheeks rosy.
"Excited to go on your trip?" the attendant asks him.
"Trip?" he asks, and then, "Oh, right. The premiere." The attendant is still looking at him, smiling, waiting. "I can't wait," he forces himself to say, and for the first time in his life, he feels the thrill of the lie. It unfolds. It beckons him. You can say anything you like, it promises. Anything at all.

09/14/2012

Judith called his name for what felt like forever, and when he finally took notice, he couldn't believe it had taken him that long, considering the unmistakable way she drew out the a in his name like no one else did. "You finally heard me," she said, running to him, "Hi, James. Can you believe it? Running into me here?" She was panting for air, but smiling in that big way she always had. Ten years hadn't done a thing to her smile or her eyes. After she hugged him – during which he felt his face flush a little, having a sudden flashback to a dark booming gymnasium, slow dancing with her, her body warm – he asked what she was doing here. A conference, she said. Was she here long? No, just a few hours more. Her flight back to Colorado left that afternoon. As she spoke, he moved his grocery bag behind his legs, obscured from her view. He hadn't really thought about it, until he parted from her and realized that the baby food jars were sitting at the top of the bag, and he also hadn't, somehow, really gotten around to telling her much about his life these days. He had even kissed her on the cheek before they said goodbye, a detail, of course, he would omit when he was at home that evening telling Cecile about running into his old high school girlfriend. At the end of his story, Cecile only responded by holding up one of the tiny orange jars and saying, "You bought squash. James, you know she doesn't like squash." And for a moment, he thought that Cecile meant that Judith didn't like squash, and he laughed, and then the baby laughed, and Cecile sighed and put the little jar back in the bag. "Well, maybe one day she will," he said, and looked over at the baby. "And she doesn't like peas, either," Cecile said, holding up another jar. "Just hold onto them," he said. "She could soon change her mind."

08/31/2012

We lived in a house by the sea. Nobody there had seen a family quite like ours before; we had hair the color of fire, and we were so rosy skinned, and so tall. We had to duck under the doorways of our neighbors. "Twins!" people would say. "We thought that was just a myth." But the Colliers – a retired couple, who had never gotten around to having any children – didn't act surprised. Maybe they had originally come from somewhere else. They had a little thickness in their voices, after all. In their pale yellow kitchen, Mrs. Collier pressed pastry dough into tart shells while we eagerly watched over her shoulder. She let us pour the filling in, then we sat at the dining table until they were ready. "Won't Mr. Collier want some?" we asked as we dug our forks in, but Mrs. Collier shook her head. She said he didn't care for sweets, and besides, right now he was in the woods behind their house, harvesting firewood and hunting rabbits for dinner. "Oh," we said. "Hundreds of them out there," she said. "Mr. Collier could bring you along next time, if you'd like." Our mother had taught us to accept invitations, even when we didn't want to, and so we went with him the following Saturday. We linked our arms together, my twin and I, and we followed Mr. Collier at a cautious distance. "Let's turn back," we whispered to each other, shivering, but then we came to a clearing. "There!" Mr. Collier said. "You see?" But we didn't see any rabbits. All we saw were stones upon stones, all smooth and gray and speckled with mica. Mr. Collier picked one up, and held it against his chest. He was smiling. We brought the stone back to the house, and then we politely said that we had to be home for dinner. They watched us go, waving from the doorway. And the next day, they were gone. No house, no trace of the winding driveway, not a crumb. This is what we remember most from our time by the sea, when we were most awake, when we were so young.

08/17/2012

Once, when he was fifteen, and August was sweltering, he rode his bicycle from his parents' house on the hill down toward Lake Steven. In one moment he was furiously squeezing the brakes, and in the next he was moving in a kind of squiggle across the road. Then he was lying face-up beside the stop sign, one arm hot with pain. A shadow moved over him. "Young man," a woman's voice said. "You took quite the spill, didn't you?" Her name was Lalani, and she substitute taught at his high school. He might have had her for math, but it was hard for him to think of anything clearly right then. In her car, as she drove him to the hospital, he had to keep his feet out of the way of a stack of books on the floor of the car. "My son's name is David. You must know him?" asked Lalani. "Oh," he said. He hadn't made the connection before, but now it seemed obvious: the caramel colored skin, the sharp eyes. "He said you've made fun of him," she continued, and now her voice was lower. "You can imagine I didn't like hearing that very much." "I don't–" he started, and then stopped. He moved one leg over on the seat, peeling it slowly from the hot leather. They were at a five-way intersection now, and Lalani had taken her hands off the steering wheel and placed them in her lap. He could feel her staring at him. The car behind them honked. "Calling him fat, pushing him in the hall – that's what my David told me you did. You did do it, didn't you?" The car behind them honked again. For a moment, he considered opening the door and running for it. He could find a pay phone, call his mother at work, have her pick him up. If he cried a little, she would feel sorry for him instead of lecturing him about his bike. But the bike was exactly the problem: how would he explain its disappearance? It would still be back there, crumpled in Lalani's trunk. She was waiting for him to answer. In the side mirror, he could see the line of cars growing behind them. "It's your turn," he mumbled. "Yes," said Lalani. "It is, isn't it?"

07/27/2012

It took Anna Maria longer than they had hoped to learn their ways. A month passed before she could prevent herself from talking about the things they didn't want talked about. They forbade talk of science fiction novels, but Westerns were okay; in fact, they liked to hear retelling of lawmen heading west, of confrontations in saloons. They asked her to tell these stories as they repeatedly bleached her hair until it was as white as bone. Each time, afterward, they braided it tightly, smoothing back stray strands with the gel they kept in small silver containers. They had used the same gel to heal her wounds after one of the expeditions, and even the scars had faded. It took her longer than they had hoped to learn the dress code (long pants were not to be worn with long sleeves, and she was to always wear at least two layers of clothing) and it took her longer to learn the correct way to cook the fuga how they liked it, soft and undercooked, still green around the edges. One, spitting his fuga back into the bowl, claimed that Anna Maria was purposefully acting dumb in order to be sent back home, but no one took him seriously; he had claimed the same about others before. But on Friday afternoons, when she was allowed on the viewing deck, no one had to tell Anna Maria how to act. This part she understood perfectly right from the start. With the others, she stood silently behind the thick wall of glass and pressed her fingertips gently against its cool surface. Until she was whisked back to her room, she remained utterly silent, unmoving. She simply stared out into the speckled black landscape, and without a coherent thought in her mind, watched the earth rotate.

07/13/2012

Standing in the middle of Macy's, his head starting to hurt and his hands shoved into his bare pockets, he doesn't have a clue what to buy for Olga. What does she even like? Between classes, she's always spitting out her hardened gum for a fresh piece, and after wiping the moisture from her lips she uses a half empty tube to apply a thin layer of gloss. He had gotten a little of it on his own lips, just once, from a kiss behind the art building; it had tasted like pineapple. So there was that, but why would he get her something she already has?

He decides to follow a stranger who reminds him of Olga. Maybe it's the cut of her hair, the way it partially obscures her face. He followers her with caution as she spins a rack of earrings, as she tries on sunglasses, as she zips and unzips a variety of colorful shoulder bags. At the perfume counter, the girl finally seems to be interested in something. She sprays two strips of paper, raises each to her nose, and makes a comment to the saleswoman behind the counter. The saleswoman laughs in agreement. Of course, the saleswoman appears to say, then reaches a hand out toward the display shelf.

"I'm interested in that one," he says, once he gets up the nerve to approach the perfume counter. Ten minutes have passed since he watched the girl stand where he is standing now. Avoiding eye contact with the saleswoman, he points, because he has no better way to identify the one he wants. The box is lavender, wrapped in cellophane. "This bottle is forty eight dollars," says the saleswoman, one manicured finger tapping the top of the box. "Oh," he says. "But the travel size," she continues, "is seventeen." Not long after, she is folding tissue paper around the small box and slipping it into a glossy bag with braided handles. Every way he tries to hold it feels awkward. Outside the department store, as the crowd moves past on the sidewalk, he shoves the box into his jacket pocket and folds the glossy gift bag flat, then bends it in half, and lets it go into the dark mouth of a trash can. He spots his bus approaching the stop on the other side of the street. Maybe, if he hurries – but there's so many people in the way. Keeping one hand in his pocket with his fingers curled around the box, gripping it tight, he starts forcing his way through, cutting diagonally in front of strangers, repeatedly mumbling apologies. He doesn't notice that the current of the crowd is what is moving him closer, that they are pushing him along.

06/22/2012

We picked up Aunt Sarah that morning at nine o'clock on the dot. She was standing out in front of the Arrivals sign, two bulging mustard yellow suitcases on either side of her. She squeezed into the back seat next to me and flashed a big grin. Her teeth were almost pure white, except for one, which was stained the palest yellow. Everything about Aunt Sarah was large: her smile, her curly hair, her figure ("Curvaceous," she explained to me, in case I ever needed to borrow the word), but most of all, her voice. It seemed to boom out of the car speakers. Her voice had the slightest syrupy quality to it, which I was deeply confused about until I learned, many years later, that she had picked up the accent on a southern vacation and, just like that, it had stuck around ever since. The entire ride back home, she talked. She told us about how the man sitting next to her on the plane dozed off and snored half the flight, and how she had smuggled an extra pack of peanuts into her purse if either of us were hungry (we weren't), and how she just couldn't wait to taste my mother's famous five-cheese casserole since it had been almost a decade since she'd last had it. When we arrived at the house, she was the first one to notice that the power had gone out. "Wouldn't be a trip without something going wrong," she sighed, dropping her luggage inside the doorway.

But since it was summer, sunlight lasted through dinner. The oven wasn't working, but the phone was, so we called for delivery. "Such a shame about the casserole," Aunt Sarah moaned repeatedly through dinner, poking a splintered chopstick at her chow mein. When the light in the house began to fade, my mother set candles along the window sills and across the countertops. She withdrew dust-coated board games from the closet and poured Aunt Sarah a glass of wine, then a glass for herself. "We've got Monopoly," my mother said, "Or Scrabble. Or there's cards. Sarah?" "I think I'll just watch." Aunt Sarah joined in anyway, once her glass of wine was depleted and she realized there was really nothing else left to do. By the fourth round of cards, the last glow of sunset was gone, and by the eighth, almost all of the candles had turned to soft wax and burned out. We were reduced to only our voices. We put our cards down. Two circles of light appeared at a distance through the living room window. We watched as they came closer, then as they turned away and parked at an angle. Two figures climbed out of the truck and stood in the beams of light, then went to work. For a long time, we just sat there, watching. Then the bulbs above us flicked on. The room burned white. I shielded my eyes. When I was finally able to pull my hands away, what struck me most was how colorful it all was, the palette infinite.

05/25/2012

On Fridays, the only day she left the house, Sweetie rode the city buses. There was only one whose route came close to her – the 14 – but that dropped her off downtown and from there she could go nearly anywhere. Once downtown, she waited at the stop in front of Macy's for the next bus. Sweetie didn't even bother looking at the route number. She just got on, waved her paper transfer at the driver, and found a seat. Before – when she had still been able to drive – she had always hated the buses. You couldn't see around them, and they went so slowly, and always made more stops than seemed necessary. But now she didn't really care at all. She didn't have anywhere to be. This was simply her brief getaway for the week, and all she was really looking for was a feeling of having traveled, even if it wasn't so far away from home.

Sometimes another person sat next to her. When the bus became crowded enough it was unavoidable; other times it just happened anyway. Once, the woman sitting beside Sweetie asked where she had purchased her watch. This took her by surprise, and she said, "It was an heirloom," despite that not being true at all. But that was always what happened when strangers talked to her. It made her anxious, and she would inexplicably say things that weren't true. And then there was Jonathan. He was young, maybe seventeen at most. She didn't know why he had bothered talking to someone like her, but he had, and then somehow it happened again the following week. He reminded her of her brother, when they were around that age. Maybe it was the smile – she wasn't sure. But he didn't bring out the nervousness in her, and that was enough to make her enjoy the company.

Sweetie was finding, to her surprise, that she needed less sleep the older she got. Or, rather, she couldn't sleep longer than five or six hours at a time. So in the pre-dawn hours of those days, she sat at the small kitchen table watching the steam rise from a dark mug of tea. She spent those hours thinking about the bus rides. With her mind very still, she could recall exactly how the feel of the cracked seats felt against her skin. It was not hard for her to recall the electronic bell that rang when a passenger pulled the cord for the next stop, or the sound of coins spilling into the farebox. The crescendo of the engine, the water spots on the windows: it had all been stored, two hours at a time. She had soaked in every speck of it, and now it was hers, inside her, available any time she liked.

04/27/2012

Minutes after the television exploded, my mother emerged out of the doorway of the house, clutching what she could: the photo albums, her jewelry box, a paperback with an illegible spine, and a pair of bronze-plated baby shoes. She was panting wildly, strands of cement-colored hair clinging to the sweat on her forehead. She could barely hold her head up to look at my father, who was rushing back from the Cooper's house next door. "You went back in," he said. "Why did you go back in?" "My God," said my mother, wiping the hair off her face with a shaky palm, "I need to sit down." But she remained standing, swaying. The northeast corner of the house radiated with flames. One of the bedroom windows was broken, the curtains behind it ablaze. "Marianne?" he was asking her. "Marianne, are you okay?" But before she could answer, their neighbor, Mrs. Cooper, was at her side, in her robe and slippers. She held a cool washcloth in one hand and a highball glass in the other. Mrs. Cooper hesitated, then set her cocktail on the sidewalk, pressing the towel into my mother’s hands. Everything that my mother had carried out of the house was now arranged on the lawn, circled around her like children. "Look at that," Mrs. Cooper said. She bent down, not bothering to adjust her robe. She picked up the bronze-plated baby shoes. "Those were Eleanor's," my mother said. Me, that tiny, if you could imagine it. "Oh?" asked Mrs. Cooper. She started to say more, but then the whine of the fire engines echoed from down the dark street, and the three of them turned to watch, waiting, just waiting, for them to come.

04/13/2012

These last few damp, bluish-gray days are the kind that Callum likes most. He gets up early to feel ahead of the game. In his narrow kitchen, he rewarms and swallows down half a cup of coffee, rinsing the ring out of the cup afterward with a splash of cold water. He does this set of movements with his right hand – the other arm is just a half-limb, ending above the crook where his elbow had once been. After dressing, Callum clips the old leather leash onto his dog's collar. The dog has been shadowing Callum ever since he rolled out of bed, breaking away only to eat or to scratch violently at the back of his speckled gray ear. Callum wriggles his feet into the canvas slip-on shoes left on the mat by the door. Outside, on the step, the dog presses past his legs and stretches in the cool morning air. They jog up the flat blocks. At the intersection, where there is a shoe repair shop and a little café, the light turns yellow, then red. Callum scans the front pages of the newspapers displayed outside the café. Sometimes he ties the dog to the rusted post by the door and slips inside for an espresso instead of drinking the weak, grainy stuff he makes in his own kitchen. When he does go in, the barista behind the counter is always the same: a spare dark-haired girl, with a soft voice and pretty features. "Do you want a punchcard?" she always asks, even though he has told her, several times, that he already has one, and when he holds it out to her it is creased and full of holes.

There have been days when she is the only person he talks to. The other days, when he goes to the bookshop in the late morning and works until locking up at seven, he at least has Ames and the customers. Though, to be fair, Ames only speaks to Callum when the register jams, or when he's going out for lunch, or when the display window needs to be switched. Last week, Callum changed the display to feature books with white covers. Pure white, like the start of a dream. Ames stood outside the shop, watching him, biting the tip of his thumb nervously. "Well," he had said, coming back in, the bell on the door ringing, "It's different, I'll give you that much."

In front of the café, the intersection light flips to green. They cross the street. A child coming from the opposite direction, tagging behind his parents, stares at Callum's bisected sleeve. Callum picks up the pace, trying to get away from that feeling of wanting to turn around and go back home. Finally, the edge of the university campus comes into view. With its open lawns and winding brick paths, it's the closest thing to a park near his apartment. Morning classes are in session, and there are only a handful of students out. They enter through the northeast entrance. The dog is pulling him, so he lets the leash uncoil a few feet off his wrist. They trot past a row of low-roofed administration buildings, then take the wide steps that spit them out into a grove of Yoshino cherry trees. He's surprised to see that they're in bloom. Just last week, there was hardly a speck of pink. Callum decides that he'll come back with a camera tomorrow, if he can manage to find it. He'll wake up early, get dressed in his slow and steady way, and come over to campus again. All he needs is a moment, and then they will be his forever.

02/17/2012

I had but a single memory of my grandfather Yuan: on Sundays, when my parents drove us to my grandparents' sand-colored bungalow, Yuan would retreat to the small, single-window kitchen and labor over an egg whisk and a round tin to produce an airy, perfectly round sponge cake. I could remember no visit without it. Yuan hardly set foot in that corner of the house, aside from this weekly ritual. It was the only thing he had any desire to make, and years later, the only thing he had any desire to eat. Yuan was unhurried as he cracked the eggs on the countertop, and steadfast as he beat them to a thick and opaque froth. His was an economical man; no movement went to waste. He slowed his stirring as each ingredient was added. Finally, he poured the pale yellow batter into a parchment-lined steamer, which was placed over a pot of boiling water. He slipped a towel under the lid of the pot before leaving the kitchen. "To catch dripping water," he said, when I shyly asked, and I imagined tiny raindrops threatening the sponge cake. Those Sundays, the cramped kitchen was also occupied by my grandmother as she prepared the heart of the meal: thick oily noodles, fried strips of pork, leafy vegetables in a pool of glistening sauce, packed bowls of steamed rice. She shouted in Chinese over the hiss and crackle of the food to Yuan, and then in bumbling English to us. "Why her hair so long?" she protested to my mother, meaning me. "She should keep it short. Out of the way." After lunch, wedges of cake were served on blue and white porcelain that, afterward, I would help clear from the table and stack by the kitchen sink. Only a few crumbs were the remaining evidence of Yuan's toil. "Oh, that sponge cake," my mother always sighed, once we were back in the car. She glanced at me in the flip-down mirror while reapplying her lipstick. "I've been eating it since I was your age." "Ma Lai Go," I said quietly. It was what Yuan had whispered to me when he removed the lid of the pot and a cloud of steam rose toward his face. It was the only time I ever saw him smile – as soon as the steam cleared, he always returned to his normal, serious self.

02/03/2012

Maddy had read a short story about it in some magazine, although now she couldn't recall which one. What she did remember was that you had to bake two pies – one with, and one without. She baked them both on the middle rack, placing the one for herself on the right side, nudging it gently into the oven. Then she wound the timer, and wiped the flecks of flour off her palms. She made the phone call with the cell phone her daughter had given her over the holidays. "For emergencies," her daughter had said, but by that week's end, Maddy had discovered that she liked being able to make a call while she was in town; she had even used it to call Dr. Keller when she was held up in traffic and running late to her appointment. Now, in the brightly lit hallway just outside of the kitchen, she dialed John's number. "Still coming at three?" she asked, and then, "No, no. No need. Just bring yourself."

At a quarter to three, Maddy pulled the pies out of the oven. They looked identical: both golden brown, both stained dark purple in a few places where the filling had seeped through. She set two plates on the counter, reminding herself that hers would be the one on the right. Not a good time for forgetfulness, she thought.

John, predictably, was late. And he had in his hands a small container of cookies, even though she had told him to bring nothing. "I baked a pie," said Maddy in protest, but John was already in the kitchen. "Two pies, I see!" he said. "I'll put the cookies out on a plate, if you don't mind." She couldn't stop him; he was already setting them out on a platter, placing the chocolate chip cookies on one side and the oatmeal cookies on the other. "Taste the pie," said Maddy. She was suddenly holding a forkful of it up to his mouth, cupping her other hand under it. Behind her, on the counter, the pie on the left was steaming from the place she had dug into. "Not yet," said John. "Go on. Taste it," said Maddy. And be done with it. But he looked hesitant. He looked nervous. He looked as though he knew. He broke off an edge of one of the oatmeal cookies, and held it out to her. "Only if you try a cookie first," he said. "Fine," she said, "But I want a chocolate chip one." "Suit yourself," said John. "But I want a bite of the other pie."

01/20/2012

On clear nights, the creature came out of the woods and wandered through our town. My little brother called it the noche perro; he had been teaching himself Spanish ever since a pretty exchange student from Córdoba was assigned to his class. ("Doesn't she speak English?" asked our father, over dinner. "Yes," said my brother, "but that's not the point." Then, to me: "Lindy, pass the butter, por favor.") He was wrong about the creature, though – it wasn't a perro at all. It was much too big, hairy, and aware of its surroundings. I had seen it dig through our neighbor's trash cans, and it was methodical in its ways, eating certain pieces and throwing back others after a moment of consideration. I had seen it bury something in the Andersons' garden. I had seen it hide from a cat, retreating into a shadow until the tabby crossed the street. But even when the creature reemerged, it looked uneasy, as if at any moment the cat might come running back and attack.

Then some of the PTA moms got wind of the creature. They said it was sniffing around the schoolyard. They spoke to the local news, claiming that two of the neighborhood cats were missing. When they realized that the creature was after nothing more than our garbage, they insisted that everyone hide their trash cans in their garages at night. "Now this monster will leave us alone," they said.

When the creature came back, it seemed confused. Where there had once been bins stuffed with dinner scraps and plastic packaging and used tissue, there were now only round depressions in the grass. From house to house, it found the same thing – except at one. Outside of our house, the creature found a brown lunch bag, and inside the bag, my lunch. A peanut butter and honey sandwich. Half an apple. Some crackers. The creature sniffed at the food, gave a moment of thought, and then removed the sandwich from its plastic bag. It ate the bag, chewing slowly, and then took the sandwich in its mouth and started walking back toward the street. It looked back only once, glancing up toward my bedroom window. I saw the the glow of its small, oval eyes, and then I ducked out of sight.

12/02/2011

Four hours on the train to Portland feels like a week to Ralphie, whose palms are beginning to sweat at the thought of actually seeing her today, of actually having a face-to-face conversation. How many times has he rehearsed? Too many, probably. An hour ago, just outside of Centralia, Ralphie had walked through the swaying train cars – gripping the backs of seats to keep balanced, squeezing by passengers carrying trays of hot bagels and coffee – and climbed the narrow staircase to the observation car on the upper deck. He had sat in the middle of an empty row of seats that faced sideways toward the broad, reflective windows. The view was limited to marshland; miles and miles of it. In his head, he practiced the conversation again, and then again, and again, stopping only when the train itself came to a stop at the next station. Now, back in his seat, he can feel the sweat on his hands. He decides that he will practice once more, and then try to take a nap, so that he will look rested when he sees her at the train station. Then he'll tell her why he needs her to come back home. And it will work. He knows it will. It has to. On this accelerating train, with only two stops to go, that much he is sure of.

11/18/2011

I had been reading my sister's diary for two weeks when, finally, something interesting happened: she developed a crush. Not just on anyone, but on Lee Lebovitz, who aced every math test and snorted when he laughed, but who also rode a motorcycle that was always in the senior parking lot despite him being a junior. In her diary, my sister smothered one of the white pages with lipstick-stained kisses. "Lee Lebovitz," she wrote, in small, tidy handwriting, "you are really missing out."

In the mornings, when she was in the shower, I continued to sneak into her bedroom and carefully remove the diary from the back of her desk drawer. Before, she had never written more than a page, but now she sometimes filled two or three pages with a detailed account of every interaction she had with Lee. "Best day ever," she wrote. "Was partnered up with Lee in Biology!" And the next day, "Accidentally bumped hands twice during class. A sign?!?" But then, out of nowhere, Lee started walking around campus holdings hands with a girl who had a "stupid-looking haircut, and no personality," according to my sister, who just as quickly became moody and quiet. At dinner, she pushed the food around on her plate until our mother demanded that she either eat or leave the table. She started to go to bed early every night, and sulked around the house on the weekends instead of going out like she'd always done. When I snuck into her room to peek at her diary, she hadn't written anything new for an entire week.

I thought it would pass. Isn't that what crushes were supposed to do? She'd get over him, find someone new to fantasize about, return to writing her long, zealous entries. But a whole month went by, and the pages remained blank. I was bored. I was restless. I came up with the only plan I could think of: I took a piece of our mother's pink stationery, wrote what I needed to, folded it into quarters, and slipped it into Lee Lebovitz's locker after third period, making sure no one saw me do it.

When the diary entry finally appeared, my sister wrote it in a fresh loopy handwriting, as if it was an entirely new version of herself. Lee Lebovitz, she announced, was now single again. Not only that, but he had smiled at her in the hallway, the type of smile that made her feel a little bit light-headed and very much hopeful. "It must be fate," she wrote, "because there's just no other explanation."

11/11/2011

For all those years, I don't even know you exist. Then, just like that, we are standing in the snack aisle at Kroger, both eyeing the last box of chocolate chip granola bars. You make a suggestion: you'll buy it, then give me half of the granola bars, in exchange for nothing more than my phone number. I laugh. "You can't be serious," I say. "Come on," you say. "You could even give me a fake number." "And a fake name," I point out. "That, too." "I'm Jenny, by the way," I say. "Or maybe you aren't," you say.

Friday night, we see a horror movie together in the multiplex downtown. Whenever foreboding music kicks in, I stare at the neon green exit signs instead of the movie screen. It occurs to me later that this is a bad avoidance technique. At dinner, I keep seeing green spots on my menu. I decide to ask the waiter what he recommends. "The lasagna," he says. I ask what else he recommends. He explains to me that it's all good, because if it wasn't, they wouldn't put it on the menu. "Don't leave him a tip," I tell you, after the waiter leaves. "Who says I'm paying?" you ask, smiling.

After the twelve or thirteenth date, I stop counting. I keep trying to pay for things, but you always tell me I can get it next time. I eventually have to admit to you that I am, in fact, terrified of horror movies. You confess that you were never really that crazy about granola bars. Sometime after Christmas, you give me a key to your apartment. "This might be a bad idea," I say. "I'm always losing things." "Right. I forgot about that," you say. "That's our problem," I say. "Neither of us can hold onto anything."

Do you remember the birds? All those sparrows in the tree outside your building? It seemed like there were a hundred, at least. They were on every branch, rustling, chirping, coming and going. People could hear them all the way down the block. We were watching them from your window. You had just asked if I wanted to get out of the city that weekend, and I was saying, "Yes, but where?" and then, all at once, they abandoned the tree. They became a small dark cloud rising from the branches, rising higher than the rooftops until they broke apart and scattered in all directions. For a split second, the sky was polka-dotted, and then it returned to a single shade of blue.

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